The Origins of the Clock

NOW the scene changes again, and the story shifts forward over the interval of a thousand years. As we take up the tale once more, we find ourselves in another world, amid a life as different from that ancient life of which we have been speaking as either of them is from our own life to-day.

The ancient civilization, which may be traced from Rome through Greece, Babylon and Egypt back to the dim dawn of history, is gone almost as if it had never been. For there came a period when great hordes of barbarians defeated the armies, burnt the cities, pillaged and destroyed, leaving only desolation and ruin behind them. Then followed hundreds of years of what we call the "Dark Ages,"--ages of ignorance and violence, when mankind was slowly struggling upwards again and was forming a new civilization upon the ruins of the old. Therefore, at the point we have now reached, there are no more white temples and pillared porticos and sandaled men in white tunic and toga, and marble statues in green gardens; but everywhere we find sharp roofs and towers, quaint outlines, and wild color like a child's picture-book.

There are castles with their moats and battlements, and monasteries with their cloistered arches; there are knights in armor riding, and lords and ladies gorgeous in strange garments, and monks in their dull gowns, and the sturdy peasant working in the field; and in the towns, all among peaked gables and Gothic windows and rough cobbled streets, a motley crowd of beggar and burgher and courtier, priest and clerk, doctor and scholar and soldier and merchant and tradesman-an endless variety of types, and each in the distinctive costume of his calling. And there are churches everywhere, from the huge cathedral towering like a forest of carven stone to the humble village chapel or wayside shrine, their spires all pointing up to heaven in token of the change that has come upon the life and spirit of the world.

We have come from the height of the classic period suddenly into the heart of the Middle Ages; and in the dark centuries that lie between, Christ and His Disciples have come and gone, and the religion of the Western World has changed; the old gods have perished and the saints have filled their places. And Rome has died, and Romance has been born.

The center of civilization has shifted to the north and west; from the old ring of lands around the Mediterranean to the great nations of modern Europe. Italy has become a jealous group of independent cities, great in art and commerce, but in little else. Germany is much the same, except for the lack of some few score centuries of tradition. France and Spain are already great and growing. William the Conqueror has fought and ruled and died, and the "Merry England" of song and story has grown up out of the fusion of Saxon and Norman. Chivalry and the Crusades, the times of Ivanhoe and The Talisman, are as fresh as yesterday.

And by green hedgerows and hospitable inns, Chaucer's Pilgrims are plodding onward toward the sound of Canterbury's bells. For here is the point of all our seeking--that there are clocks now in the monasteries and in the Cathedral towers. There is just one curious link of likeness between the Middle Ages and the remoter past; as it was at first at Babylon, so now in the fourteenth century the priesthood holds almost a monopoly of science and of learning.

Thus, although the sun-dial, clepsydra and sand-glass are still much used, we find ourselves at last in the time and lands of clocks. The very sound of the word "clock" gives a clue to its origin. It suggests the striking of the hour upon some bell. The French called the word cloche and the Saxons clugga, and both of these originally meant a bell.

If you will put yourself back in the picture at the beginning of the chapter, you will find yourself in a realm of sounding, pealing, chiming bells with the hours of prayer throughout the day, from matins to angelus, rung out from the belfries, and with frequent deep-toned strikings of the hour. Not even a blind man could have remained unconscious of the passage of the hours under such conditions, and time, in a sense, became more a possession of democracy although timepieces themselves were still the mark of special privilege.

Life also was beginning to hurry just a little. Very deliberate, we should call it in comparison with the mad rush of the twentieth century, and yet it began to show its growing complexity in that humanity was becoming more definitely organized and men were forced to depend more and more upon each other. In all of this, there was a slightly growing sense of the things that were to be, just as the water for some miles above Niagara begins to hasten its course under the influence of the mighty cataract over which it will at last go madly plunging.

Herein occurs another of those baffling questions, like the old-time puzzler as to whether the hen first came from the egg or the egg from the hen. One cannot help wondering to what extent the increasing accuracy of the broadening knowledge of time-keeping was the result of our complicated modern life and to what extent it was the cause. Certainly we cannot conceive of present-day affairs as being conducted save in the light of moving hands and figures upon a dial.

From the Middle Ages, then, we get our word for clock and, which is more important, we begin to get some crude application of its modern mechanical principles. They were wonderfully skilful, those medieval workmen, considering the means at their disposal, and the ingenuity of some of their clocks is still a delight, but, perhaps, for better under-standing of the story, we should stop for a minute to inquire exactly what a clock means from the mechanical point of view.

A clock is a machine for keeping time. And for this there are four essentials, without any one of which there would be no clock. First, there must be a motive power to make it run; second, there must be a means of transmitting this power; third, there must be a regulating device to make the mechanism move steadily and slowly, and keep the motive power from running down too quickly; and, fourth, there must be some device to mark the time and make it known.

In a typical modern clock the power comes from the pull of a weight or the pressure of a spring--although clocks may, of course, be operated by electricity or compressed air or some other means; also, the regulator is what is known as the "escapement" and the recording device consists of the hands, the dial, and the striking mechanism. Having stated this, let us return to the past and see if we can determine how these principles came to be applied.

This is not altogether easy. Our forefathers were less particular than we over such trifling questions as names and spelling--even the learned Shakespeare, long afterward, used several different spellings of his own name. Thus, when we see in the records of the period the name of "clock" or "horologe" we cannot tell with certainty what type is meant, since "horologe" meant simply a device for keeping time; it might have been applied equally well to a clock, clepsydra, an hour-glass, or even a sun-dial.

"It is quite possible," writes M. Gubelin Breitschmidt, the younger, an eminent horologist of Lucerne, Switzerland, "that a large number of the technical inventions of antiquity were lost during the migrations of the barbarians and under the chaotic conditions prevailing during the first thousand years of Christianity, but the most perfect surviving instrument for measuring time was the water-clock, known as the clepsydra, which was able to maintain its supremacy long after the appearance of the wholly mechanical clock, just as the beautiful manuscripts of the artist monks and laymen were favored by the cultured classes long after the invention of movable types for printing.

"The spread of Christianity throughout Europe caused the foundation of many religious communities, and the severe rules by which they were governed--fixing the hours of prayer, labor, and refreshment--forced their members to seek instruments by which to measure time. In the year 605, a bull of Pope Sabinianus decreed that all bells be rung seven times in the twenty-four hours, at fixed moments and regularly, and these fixed times became known as the seven canonical hours. The sound of the bells penetrated and came to regulate not only the life of the religious bodies but also that of the secular people who lived outside the walls of the monasteries. Oil-lamps, candles, hour-glasses, prayers and--for those who had the means of buying them--clepsydrae served as chronometers for the brotherhoods; so that one can easily imagine that many a monk sought to improve these instruments. But as yet, no one had found means to regulate the wheel-system of a movement. In the best instruments of this period, water supplied the motive power and served as well to regulate the action."

There is a general belief that Gerbert, the monk, who was the most accomplished scholar of his age, and who later became Pope Sylvester II, was the one who first took the important step of producing a real clock, and that this occurred near the close of the tenth century--or to be more exact, about 990 A. D. This period was one of densest superstition, and expectancy of the end of the world was in the air, since many people had fixed upon the year 1000 A. D. as the date of that cataclysmic event.

Authorities of the Church and of the state were not very partial to invention and research, their attention being fixed largely upon theological, political, or military affairs; but, of course, inquiring and constructive minds were still to be found; even without encouragement these tended to follow the impulse of their natures.

It is to the monks in their cloisters that we chiefly owe the preservation of learning through the "dark ages," and from the monks, for the most part, came such progress of science and invention as was made. If Gerbert, the monk, after patient tinkering with wheels and weights in his stonewalled workshop, really achieved some form of the clock-action as we know it, he was one of the great benefactors of the human race. Still, it is not impossible that his device may only have been a more remarkable application of the clepsydra principle.

Whatever it was, it seems to have startled the authorities, for they are said to have accused him of having practiced sorcery through league with the devil, and to have banished him for a time from France. His age appears to have had a vast respect for the intellectual powers of his Satanic Majesty. Anything which was too ingenious or scientific to be understood without an uncomfortable degree of mental application was very apt to be ascribed to diabolic inspiration and thus found unfit for use in "Christian" lands. It could hardly have been a stimulating atmosphere for would-be inventors.

All of the credit that we are ascribing to Gerbert must therefore be prefixed with an "if." Did he really invent the clock-movements, or is this merely another of the tales which have blown down to us from this age of tradition and romance? For similar tales are told of Pacificus in 849 A. D. of the early Pope Sabinianus in 612 and even of Boetheus, the philosopher, as far back as 510 A. D., while always in the background are claims of priority for the Chinese who are supposed to have discovered many of our most important mechanical and scientific principles away off upon the other side of the world before these were dreamed of in the west.

If all of these various claims were true, which is far from likely, it still would not need to surprise us, for it must be remembered that humanity, until within the past few generations, was more or less a collection of separated units and its records were very incomplete. There was scant interest in abstract research and very limited intercourse between towns and countries; one who made an important discovery in one locality might be unheard of a hundred miles away. Unless all the conditions were favorable, his ideas might even pass from memory with his death, until some scholar of modern times might chance upon their record.

All that can with certainty be said, therefore, is that there were clocks of some sort in the monasteries during the eleventh century; that back of these were the clepsydrae and other time recording devices; and that here and there through the preceding centuries are more or less believable tales of inventions that had to do with the subject.

Let it be remembered, too, that some of the brilliant minds of ancient times made discoveries that were forgotten after the barbarian waves overwhelmed preceding civilizations. The ages following the downfall of Rome were those of intellectual darkness, illiteracy, and rude force until mankind groped slowly back toward the light through the process of rediscovery.

Thus, it mattered not at all to the medieval world that Archimedes, the great Greek scientist and engineer--who, however, chanced to live in the Greek colony of Sicily--was able, somewhere about 200 B. C., to construct a system of revolving spheres which reproduced the motion of the heavenly bodies. Such a machine must necessarily have involved some sort of clock-work. We dare not stop to consider Archimedes, lest we stray too far from our subject, but this marvelous man of ancient times, the Benjamin Franklin of his day, seems to have had a hand in almost every sort of mechanical and scientific research, from discovering the principle of specific gravity, in order to checkmate a dishonest goldsmith, to destroying Roman war-ships by means of his scientific "engines." The story is told that he set the ships on fire by concentrating upon them the rays of the sun from a number of concave mirrors. And, although this story may not be true, the things that he is known to have done are extraordinary.

Archimedes and his knowledge had long passed away when the monastery clocks of the eleventh century began to sound the hour. These were the fruit of a crude new civilization just struggling for expression, and represented the general period when William the Conqueror led his Norman army into England.